http://www.nuvo.net/indianapolis/best-of-indy-2016-is-here/BestOf?oid=4122143For the 2nd year in a row, I have been nominated for Nuvo's Best Of Indy in 2-D Art. Last year I got second, but with your help and support, I hope this year it is 1st.

You can vote once a day until the ballot closes on August 29, and I plan to post a piece almost every day with some history on the pieces until voting is over.

Please follow the event if you are interested, and share with anyone that you think my find interesting.

Thank you all for your support!

First, I wanted to say thank you to everyone for your friendship and support. Your votes are greatly appreciated, and I hope it shows. I am starting off these painting posts with a piece I am really proud of due to many factors. Beside depicting 2 of my closest friends at one of our favorite breweries Taxman Brewing, this painting was the main inspiration that rejuvenated my goal of a fulltime art career. For the years proceeding the creation of this painting, my work was mainly absent of people. I made the decision after college to focus on work that was non figure based. All I did in college was figures and portraits with the occasional class assigned still life. I was getting in a comfort zone, and the backgrounds in my work suffered. What better way to fix that than to paint what I was avoiding. By the time I decided to start on the Taxman piece, I wanted to prove to myself that that I could bring realistic figures back into my work as well as keep the space believable. I knew I was succeeding when I was about 80% done with the piece, and I posted a progress pic to Facebook. About an hour after it was posted, I received a notification from Facebook that they wanted to auto tag Tony and Justin, the 2 people in the painting. It felt good, and like I was making progress. I did not expect that concentrating on what I originally did not want to paint would have such a positive effect on parts I was purposely avoiding. All in all, I estimate there is about 80 hours of total work in the piece. A lot of time was spent on this piece. It was time well spent.